Do you think we lost useful / important information along with the account / biography Ptolemy Soter wrote of Alexander? Could you talk a bit about this book?
If I recall correctly (and I can be very wrong in this) Arrian used Ptolemy’s book as one of his main primary sources. Did any bits of it survive that are useful to modern historians?
Ptolemy Soter's History of Alexander
@akriticsongs, first, yes, Arrian used Ptolemy, along with Arisobulos, as his two chief sources for his own history. These weren’t all he used, and he certainly editorialized on them, giving his own opinions throughout. We shouldn’t take his history as a “cut-and-paste” version of theirs. That makes getting back to theirs a bit of a struggle.
One reason Arrian gives for using Ptolemy is that he was a king, and it wouldn’t do for a king to lie.
That assessment may make modern historians crack up laughing—as it should. But we must also recognize that Arrian isn’t simply being obtuse; his history was written to flatter his patron—the Emperor Hadrian. A king. Not just a king, but a king with a noted fondness for Greek culture and Greek philosophy—the first emperor to wear a beard after Greek fashion.
Was Arrian being serious about his claim? Well…probably not, although he also wasn’t playing the same sort of inside-out “I’m going to compliment you in order to insult you” games Virgil played with Augustus in his The Aeneid. Nonetheless, and whatever he says, I doubt he took Ptolemy’s history entirely uncritically.
I am not an expert on Arrian. There have been a couple of really good assessments of Arrian as an historian published recently: V. Liotsakis’s Alexander the Great in Arrian’s Anabasis (2019) and D. W. Leon’s Arrian the Historian: Writing the Greek Past in the Roman Empire (2021). The links go to their Bryn Mawr reviews. The former is more inclined to analysis of passages while the latter casta a wider net to place Arrian in context as a historian. I like both, as they do different things.
Getting back to Ptolemy’s original, Tim Howe speculated that Ptolemy was influenced by Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern tradition in the book we coedited, Macedonian Legacies (2009), “Alexander in India: Ptolemy as Near Eastern Historiographer.” And more recently, he edited an entire collection, Ptolemy I Soter: a Self-Made Man (ed., Tim Howe, 2018).
It’s too bad we don’t still have Ptolemy’s original history, for two reasons. It would be the only surviving contemporary account, and it could illustrate how later Roman-era historians parsed and refitted earlier histories to their own takes.
My personal first choice of Hellenistic-era writings I’d like to see recovered would be Marsyas’s works on ancient Macedonia (and Alexander). But after that would be Ptolemy’s history. Both would provide us with pre-Roman views of Macedon and Alexander. We don’t have that. The first Macedonian writing about Alexander (et al.) that survives (Strategemata) is late imperial military historian Polyaenus, who wrote a little after Arrian (during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, not Hadrian). There are recent debates as to whether he’s really Macedonian, but even if he was, c. 500 years separated him from his country’s most famous son. And if he calls himself a Macedonian, he was born and raised in Bithynia, and later lived in Rome, so how “Macedonian” he was would be a good question to ask. Like a lot of writers of or influenced by the Second Sophistic, he engaged in a fair bit of Hellenic beautification.
So the upshot is: yes, having Ptolemy’s history would be extremely useful, but even if we did, it would bring a different freight to problems to navigate. It might, however, help us to better assess the later Roman-era historians we do have.









